INTRODUCTION TO MUSIC

Fall Semester 2003

MUS 101-04-P MWF 9:30 Ð 10:20 Burke Rehearsal Room 4 credits

Exam Schedule B = Monday December 15, 2:00 Ð 4:00 PM

Professor Kathleen Pierson, piersonk@denison.edu

Doane Dance Building Room 303, X6392, Office Hours MW 1:30 Ð 2:30

Required Course Materials:

Text with accompanying 4-CD set: Ferris, Jean, Music: The Art of Listening (6th ed), McGraw-Hill, 2003.

This text/ CD set will cover the basics, and you will regularly be hearing additional not-from-the-text music examples played in class, and you will regularly be finding deeper detail through assignments utilizing the Internet and other resources. There will often be handouts in class, so if you are ever absent be sure to see if you might have missed a handout... In our final unit, you might want to buy a CD (of your own choosing) to support certain assignments related to jazz, although library CDs may also be used...

Course Objectives:

~ to listen to an array of recorded music, building perception and memory of music from several world traditions, and from the western music heritage including jazz.

~ to gather enough sociological and historical perspective to place those listenings into context.

~ to develop increasingly sophisticated ways of talking, writing, and thinking about music, incorporating increasingly subtle understandings of the basic elements of music

~ to briefly consider music's relation to creativity, to the other fine arts, and to other academic subjects such as psychology, sociology, religion, consumerism and law, technology, biology and physics.

~ to attend live rehearsals and performances, to experience and reflect upon the processes of creating, performing, and consuming music.

Course Rationale:

Thanks to technological advances over the last century, our world is drenched in music. We hear music so constantly that it often recedes into the background. You may not remember anything about the music of the last movie you saw, but you would certainly have recognized that something was missing if there had been no music. What happens if we bring music into the foreground and attend to it seriously? What can we hear? What additional excitements/ insights/ relationships might be revealed through heightened states of attention? How can we communicate in sophisticated ways about what we hear? Will greater knowledge of music's building blocks, or of the historical/ sociological contexts of music, affect our listening? What does the study of music have to do with anything anyway? Why do humans even bother creating music? Is it useful? Is it fun? What would it take for us to think of ourselves as musicians, rather than just as consumers of the music of others? Is music as basic as speaking, or is it a mysterious high art? We will listen to music from all over the world, and from a millennium ago in time, from the most elite and the most mundane contexts, and from our current day to day musical fabric, exploring these questions.

Grading:

Ongoing Activity and Commitment: Attendance, Classroom Participation, and Outside Assignments 20%

Three Unit Tests 20% each (a total of 60% of your final grade)

Final Exam (cumulative, covering the entire semester) 20%

Being present, being on time, and being actively engaged in class are all expected. You are responsible for finding out what you missed if you are ever absent. Absences can only be excused if there are formal reasons (such as athletic event participation, documented illness, etc.) AND you show that you have a copy of the notes from the missed class and have completed any missed work. More than two UNexcused absences will lower your letter grade for the course, as a reflection of the "Attendance, Classroom Participation, and Outside Assignments" portion of your grade. Chronic lateness or leaving early also will be noted and could impact your grade, with three noticeable latenesses roughly equaling an absence.

There will be a succession of simple assignments, all due on Mondays, never accepted late (due your first day back if you are absent on a Monday), checked off simply as either "completed" or "excellent." If computers are involved, please print out at least a rough version BEFORE Monday morning, so that if power goes out or the network goes down you will still have something to turn in. The general success of your assignments, taken as a whole at semester's end, will affect your letter grade, particularly if you are "borderline" in which case any missing assignments will definitely tilt you lower, whereas successive "excellents" will assure you of the higher of the two borderline grade choices.

Some assignments later in the semester will involve being in the room with live rehearsals or performances, which may require an evening or a weekend time commitment, but we will work together as a class to try to create a schedule of choices which realistically meets every student's scheduling needs.

There will be three Unit Tests, each worth 20%. Format may include some multiple choice, some fill in the blanks, some short answer, and choices among several possible brief essay questions. There will be actual Listening Questions, where recorded examples are played and you will identify them and be able to write about them. A Mystery Listening which we did NOT already study in class may also be included, to give you the opportunity to express your conceptual understanding by loosely identifying, describing, and placing into context even an unknown listening. The other, Non-Listening, questions may be drawn from the text, from outside assignments, or from classroom material and discussions.

Make-up tests will only be granted under the most extreme and formally documented circumstances, and if a make-up test is given it may be in a different format than the original test had been (for example, all essay questions, or all listening questions).

The Final Exam is similar in format to the Unit Tests, and is also worth 20%. However - unlike Unit Tests Ð the Final is CUMULATIVE, that is, it covers all the material of all three Units, from day one to the end.

Academic Dishonesty: I personally have zero tolerance for academic dishonesty, and you risk (at the very least) failing this course if you are found to be cheating or plagiarizing in any way at any time in this class. Please review the Handbook's crystal clear definitions of what constitutes Academic Dishonesty.

Students With Disabilities: If you desire accommodation based on the impact of a disability, let me know (privately) as soon as possible so that we can discuss your specific needs. (We rely on the Office of Academic Support in 104 Doane to verify the need for reasonable accommodations based on documentation on file in their office). In addition to these formally documented needs, I do encourage every student to be forthcoming about academic difficulties or fears, so that I have the chance to help if I can, or to help find other help (from the Office of Academic Support etc) if that seems appropriate.

****************************Important Dates****************************************

Sept 1: Classes began: if you have joined class late as an "Add," you already have an absence! This can be an "excused absence" by getting the notes from someone and briefly making the case that you DO KNOW what took place on the day(s) you already missed.

Sept 26: Last day to drop without any penalty.

UNIT TEST #1 tentatively scheduled for WEDNESDAY OCTOBER 1st

Oct 3: Last day to submit S/U grading petitions

Oct 13: Mid-semester grades (all freshmen/sophomores + other struggling students) turned in to Registrar.

UNIT TEST #2 tentatively scheduled for WEDNESDAY NOVEMBER 5th

Nov 22 Ð 30 Thanksgiving Fall BREAK Week ...We DO have class Friday Nov 21 and Monday Dec 1.

UNIT TEST #3 tentatively scheduled for WEDNESDAY DECEMBER 10th

FINAL EXAM is scheduled Grid B = MONDAY DECEMBER 15th 2:00 Ð 4:00 PM

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PLANNED TOPICS, AND YOUR READING/ LISTENING SCHEDULE:

Week 1, Sept 1 Ð 5: Start of UNIT 1, Introductory Materials, and World Music. Basic concepts, "Directed Listening," The Elements, and music's relation to other subjects, Ethnomusicology and the question of "us" vs. "other." Read/Listen in Text: Part One "Basic Concepts" (Sound, Rhythm, Melody, Harmony, Timbre, Attending Performance) pp 3 Ð 60, and Part Six "Cultural Connections: Eight Musical Encounters" (Africa, India, Islam, China, Japan, Native American, Latin American, New Internationalism) pp 385 Ð 425. Read through ALL of this as quickly as you can, reading for a general overview rather than for extreme detail. I will specify, in class, which details are most important for us. (We will go back and re-read these pages as you prepare for the Unit Test October 1st...) If the weather is dry on Friday Sept 5, we will go outside and get hands-on experience playing instruments from two cultures (Bali and Ghana), so dress for sitting comfortably out on the concrete plaza that day.

Week 2, Sept 8 Ð 12: continuing in Unit 1. Be aware that MANY non-text listening examples will be played in class, from the Smithsonian and UNESCO World Music CD sets from Denison Library. If you miss class, you will need to get the notes and GO LISTEN (on your own, in the library) to the examples we heard in class. On Friday Sept 12, we have a special fun guest, ethnomusicologist Ron Emoff, visiting class to show and play some of his favorite world instruments from his extensive personal collection.

Week 3, Sept 15 Ð 19: continuing in Unit 1. If the weather was bad back in Week 1, then THIS Friday we'll try again to do the "playing Bali and Ghana outside on the concrete plaza" eventÉ Otherwise, we'll just be "following our ears" from region to region around the world gathering more World Music details.

Week 4, Sept 22 Ð 26: continuing Unit 1. This will be the week to cover any aspects from the text (any "Basic Concepts" or "Cultural Connections..." material) that we might not have covered yet. If you did not read all of the assigned text chapters and hear all of the accompanying CD examples yet, do it now!

Week 5, Sept 29 Ð Oct 3: "The Game" (I will explain) as Review on Monday, Unit Test #1 Wednesday Oct 1, return of test and start of UNIT 2, Standard Western Music History, on Friday. Western concepts of notation, linear history, canon, and the heroic individual. The standard Style Periods. This Unit has a very different "feel" from the World Music adventures of Unit 1. Throughout this Unit, we will follow the text extremely closely. By Oct 6, Read/Listen in Text: Part Two "Ancient Greece, The Middle Ages, The Renaissance" pp 63 Ð 114.

Week 6, Oct 6 Ð 10: continuing in Unit 2. Ancient roots, through Renaissance. By Oct 13, Read/Listen in Text: first portion of Part Three "The Baroque, Classical, and Romantic Periods" pp 117 Ð 211.

Week 7, Oct 13 Ð 17: continuing in Unit 2. Baroque and Classical. By Oct 20, Read/Listen in Text: the remainder of Part Three pp. 213 Ð 273.

Week 8, Oct 20 Ð 24: continuing in Unit 2. Romantic. By Oct 27, Read/Listen in Text: Part Four "Twentieth Century Concert Music" pp 275 Ð 353.

Week 9, Oct 27 Ð 31: continuing in Unit 2. From the Romantic into the 20th Century. (no new reading)

Week 10, Nov 3 Ð 7: "The Game" as Review on Monday, Unit Test #2 on Wednesday Nov 5, return of test and start of UNIT 3, Jazz, on Friday. By Nov 10, Read/Listen in Text: Part Five "Music In The Vernacular" pp 355 Ð 383. At this point, you will have listened to every example on the 4-CD set, and you will have read the entire text. The last few weeks, our assignments will turn to the Internet, and to the library and other CD and video resources, which we will "choose as we go" in response to student interests in specific aspects of Jazz ands Jazz History. For Unit 3, the text is but a "launching pad," a shared starting point, for class listenings and experiences that will be drawn from wide-ranging sources. This means that if you miss a class, you will have to take enormous initiative to find out what we did and to track down the resources to "make up" that missed material. Some classes may even involve Live performances by student musicians, which you will simply completely miss if you miss class.

Week 11, Nov 10 Ð 14: continuing in Unit 3. "Vernacular" vs. what, exactly? Roots of jazz, the interest in "linear history," and the canonization of "jazz greats" in the "heroic individual" western music style. Improvisation vs. playing only what is notated on the page.

Week 12, Nov 17 Ð 21: continuing in Unit 3. This week may feature brief student presentations of particular jazz classics, although we will wait to set the details until we see what specific interests seem to be evolving.

(Nov 22 Ð 30 we are off for Thanksgiving Fall Break Week, have a great week!)

Week 13, Dec 1 Ð 5: continuing in Unit 3. Details to be determined.

Week 14, Dec 8 Ð 12: "The Game" as Review on Monday, Unit Test #3 on Wednesday Dec 10, Return of test and final review on Friday.

Final Exam Monday Dec 15, 2 Ð 4 PM

RETAIN THIS SYLLABUS FOR REFERENCE.

WHEN THERE ARE HANDOUTS IN CLASS, RETAIN THEM ALSO, SINCE THE FINAL IS CUMULATIVE AND YOU WILL WANT TO BE ABLE TO REVIEW BOTH YOUR OWN NOTES AND ANY HANDOUTS FROM THE ENTIRE SEMESTER.

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